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An Eye for Detail, and Plenty of Pop

CONTRAST Left, Susanna Lau wears a severe coat with an effusively draped shawl. CHECKS Ms. Lau in a coat in elephantine over a gingham skirt.CANDOR A nautical look: Ms. Lau’s necklace evokes sails, and she extends the theme with a skirt patterned in rigging and a marine palette of aqua and white.

“STYLE is, like, the wrapping paper of my life.”

The phrase is cringe-worthy. Or so imagines Susanna Lau, who uttered it in Gap’s latest advertising campaign as one in a cast of demi-celebrities delivering sound bites in online vignettes and modeling the company’s clothes.

Reviewing her part in the action, Ms. Lau, a k a Susie Bubble, the creator of Style Bubble, a comically irreverent fashion blog, backpedaled furiously. “I willingly entered into cheesy territory,” she said in a posting late last month — turf that was “marked by lines like the one above, and by airbrushing as well as the fake snow blown at me in the middle of a heat wave in New York.”

Never mind. Ms. Lau is well aware that the signature blend of candor and cheek has given her blog a cultlike status among designers, stylists and legions of civilians who dote on her quirky enthusiasms.

Call her an evangelist: She beats her drum for obscure designers, out-of-the-way shops and seldom-frequented showrooms, her message imbibed by some 30,000 visitors each day. They log on to find out what Ms. Lau thinks of ASOS Black’s “jingly-jangly dresses” or to scan her “to buy” lists for, say, a “bargainous printastic” sweater from David David, a pattern-mad London brand.

There was a time when a woman of her avid, if untutored, convictions might have found her calling as a stylist. Today she would most likely start a blog. Among her fellow opinionators, Ms. Lau, however, has an edge.

“She is a lot more exuberant than some of the other bloggers,” said the designer Nanette Lepore, who scrutinizes Style Bubble, along with her staff, several times a week, combing the site for trends, bargains and, presumably, ideas. “She’s got a fun approach that is at the same time realistic. She knows that sometimes the fun of fashion is all in the search for things, not in their actual possession.”

Fans also include the British designer Christopher Kane and the journalist Diane Pernet, who posted on her own influential blog, A Shaded View on Fashion, that she found Ms. Lau tireless in breaking new talent, and “inventive and humble” to boot.

Photo

Ms. Lau’s vibrant hose and visible underpinnings, like garters, make for striking accessories.

Ms. Lau’s inventiveness emerges in the outrageous getups she models on her site: a ruffled peignoir over a violently colorful scuba suit one day; a coat in elephantine checks over a dainty gingham skirt the next. She has been known to show off cobalt blue hose hoisted by old-fashioned garter straps.

Her humility seems genuine, if calculated at times to disarm potential detractors. “I like what I like — it’s just one opinion,” she said by telephone from her home in London. “I don’t want to claim to be something that I’m not, which is a critic.”

Ms. Lau, 26, a Londoner whose family is from Hong Kong, skipped the customary coursework in journalism and fashion design to study history. But she compensates for a lack of conventional style credentials by exploring uncharted terrain, unearthing an unknown cobbler, for instance, or offering slick coverage of Hermès’s latest pop-up store.

What began about five years ago as a hobby has turned into a fulfilling, though not lucrative, career. Style Bubble generates advertising, but scarcely enough, Ms. Lau said, to support her taste for Church’s English brogues. “The need to update something and feed it on a daily basis with no financial motivation sort of points to an obsessive tendency,” she said. “I think a lot of bloggers are obsessive in their ways.”

Ms. Lau taps at her keyboard three to fours hours a day, then weaves among shops, design studios and art exhibitions, or reports first-hand on events like the Lanvin-H & M fashion show in New York. She has a magpie eye for minutiae: the crosshatching in a swatch of silk; the latticework on a Nigerian shirt.

“If I’ve bought something, it’s usually because a detail caught my eye,” she said. “It’s important for me to convey that.”

Her finds have snared the attention of chains like Topshop; last year the company snapped up Angie Johnson, the designer of I Heart Norwegian Wood, one of Ms. Lau’s discoveries, to create a line for its stores. But her meticulous images are the bane of other designers who are wary of being knocked-off. “Some people have asked me to show fewer pictures of their work, or remove them,” she said.

Ms. Lau tends to comply with such requests, while shrugging off others because, she insists, her readers can “make of fashion what they will.”

“The magazines and the catwalks aren’t the be-all, end-all of fashion,” she said. “And people are finding that out.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 9, 2010, on page E2 of the New York edition with the headline: An Eye for Detail, And Plenty of Pop. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe